At what point does a robot become more than just a vessel for satisfying a human's needs? That's one of the many questions posed by the new HBO series Westworld, based on that other Michael Crichton story about a theme park in which the android attractions--who are designed to be fucked and killed--rise up against their creators. The series, which premiered Sunday evening, is science fiction, combined with throwback 1880s Americana period pastiche, and boasts a bordello filled with beautiful, enthusiastic robot whores who will toss back whiskey and slap your face during a threesome. In the original 1978 movie, there is a distinct divide between the robots' intelligence and ours, but the speculative technology that animates the story has made significant strides since Crichton's time. Today, we're closer than ever to being able to buy or rent the company of artificially intelligent machines, and ones we might believe could love us back. Sexual product technology has made some interesting progress in 2016.

In deep supervised learning, you can overfit a small dataset as a sanity check: making sure your model is implemented correctly and can actually learn before going on to train on your real, big dataset. Are there similar strategies in reinforcement learning, where one can get results in a few minutes before moving on to spend a day training on Space Invaders or even Pong?

Singapore is pushing for businesses to develop an autonomous wheelchair that'll convey people around without instruction. The announcement came from Mark Lim, the official in charge of the country's digital services and commercial development division. According to GovInsider, the project is going to run until March 2017 and will harness computer vision, robotics and machine learning to ferry patients around hospitals. The report quotes Lim saying that "we have limited health care workers," and that "nurses are more precious in doing their work [...] than pushing them around in the wheelchair." Singapore GDS is building autonomous wheelchairs!

When you have a photo and want to find a higher resolution copy online, you can use tools like Google Image Search and TinEye. They work in a very specific way extracting specific patterns and how they contrast with their surroundings. That works well for finding alternate copies of the same image, but it's not so great if you try to go deeper. Enter Clarifai, which creator Matthew Zeiler claims improves upon the techniques used by Google and Tineye by way of superior artificial intelligence. "We understand images and video automatically with a whole variety of different'models' as we call them," Zeiler explained to Motherboard.

Cancer is fast turning into an epidemic in India.According to a study by The National Cancer Institute (NCI), every 13th new cancer patient in the world is an Indian. In 2016, the total number of new cancer cases is anticipated to be around 14.5 lakh and that figure is likely to reach nearly 17.3 lakh in 2020, as per a study by The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Such numbers exacerbate the magnitude of healthcare issues in the country. The first step towards addressing this mammoth task is access to healthcare. The country also needs to integrate technology into the healthcare system.

In the burgeoning field of computer science known as machine learning, engineers often refer to the artificial intelligences they create as "black box" systems: Once a machine learning engine has been trained from a collection of example data to perform anything from facial recognition to malware detection, it can take in queries--Whose face is that? Is this app safe?--and spit out answers without anyone, not even its creators, fully understanding the mechanics of the decision-making inside that box. But researchers are increasingly proving that even when the inner workings of those machine learning engines are inscrutable, they aren't exactly secret. In fact, they've found that the guts of those black boxes can be reverse-engineered and even fully reproduced--stolen, as one group of researchers puts it--with the very same methods used to create them. In a paper they released earlier this month titled "Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs," a team of computer scientists at Cornell Tech, the Swiss institute EPFL in Lausanne, and the University of North Carolina detail how they were able to reverse engineer machine learning-trained AIs based only on sending them queries and analyzing the responses.

During my commute the other day, I ended up on a dark subway car. The train still had power--the air conditioning was on, the announcements were coming through--but all the lights were dead. I live near an above-ground stop, so at first there was morning sunshine coming in through the windows. But when the train went underground, we were plunged into complete darkness. I found myself suddenly in a sea of floating, ghostly faces, illuminated by the glow of smartphones.

Toyota has revealed it's latest artificial intelligence creation, and this time, it's a robot baby named'Kirobo Mini'. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Toyota has revealed it's latest artificial intelligence creation, and this time, it's a robot baby named'Kirobo Mini'.

In recent months, several prominent champions of technology -- Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Tesla founder Elon Musk among them -- have declared that the greatest threat to humankind is not climate change, nuclear warfare, religious fanaticism or bacterial superbugs. No, according to these famous forward-thinkers, the threat we should really be worried about is advanced artificial intelligence. That is, we should be worried about supersmart robots and computers guided by a globally networked über-entity that will one day be able to outlearn, outthink and outcompete the human species and send it hurtling toward extinction. Late last year, Hawking, a physicist, came right out and told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." In a recent symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tesla's Musk said that creating advanced artificial intelligence was "summoning the demon."

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display